Victor Rosewater

Victor Rosewater (1871-1940), son of the
founder of the Omaha Bee, followed his well-known father,
Edward Rosewater, into journalism. Victor's reminiscences of
his life with the Bee appeared in the Sunday Bee
on June 23, 1918:

"It just happened that the Bee
and I made our advent in Omaha at almost the same time. I was
born in February [February 13] and the Bee's first issue
came in June in the year 1871. The Bee, as is well known,
was originally designed to be only a temporary institution when
it showed that it was responding to a real demand of the community.

"As the oldest son in a family of
five children, it simply was taken for granted that I would follow
in the footsteps of my father and eventually help relieve him
in the publication of the Bee. My education, without any
discussion, directed itself toward that goal. . . .

"My very first job on the Bee
consisted in folding papers. We then lived in a cottage that
stood where the Bee building is today [1918]. The Bee
office was then located on Farnam, between Ninth and Tenth streets.
The papers were produced on presses that printed but one side,
so that each copy had to go through twice. There were no automatic
folders. When our morning paper was first issued, I used to go
down to the Bee office about five o'clock every morning
and help at folding papers for about an hour, for which I was
paid sixty cents a week. A little later, when the Bee
was having some trouble because its competitors were subsidizing
the newsboys not to handle the Bee, I sold papers on the
streets. Those were days of 5-cent newspapers and I would sell
from twenty to fifty a day, giving me quite a little money to
show for the work."

Victor Rosewater entered Johns Hopkins
University in 1888 and later enrolled in Columbia University,
where his major areas of study were history, economics, and political
science. He became one of the regular staff on the Bee
in 1893, and in 1906 following the death of his father on August
31, took over as managing editor, becoming editor the following
year.

In addition to his work as editor of the
Bee, Victor Rosewater became involved in political affairs.
He recalled in 1918 that the state campaign of 1894 was the "first
hot political campaign" in which he participated. In 1908
he served as a member of the Republican National Committee, and
in 1912 was chairman of the committee. He was also active in
civic affairs in Omaha, as a director of the public library from
1894 to 1905, the Omaha Board of Review in 1903, and numerous
social and fraternal clubs.

In 1920 the Bee was acquired by
the Omaha News, becoming the Bee-News, which in
turn was bought by the Hearst Company in 1928. The end of the
Bee came in 1937, when it was purchased by the Omaha
World-Herald.